Fred Burton, Stratfor VP for Racist Slurs

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The “GI Files” paint a decidedly unflattering portrait of Stratfor Vice-President for Intelligence Fred Burton, a man considered one of the US’ top counter-terrorism experts.

Not only is he short-tempered, a “tyrant” according to Director of Analysis Reva Bhalla (doc-id 59630), and "paranoid" (his own words), he also employs unabashedly racist language, regularly referring to Arabs as “towel heads” (doc-id 224103), “camel jockies” or “sleezy arsehole ragheads” (doc-id 1227888), and Pakistanis as “Pakis” (doc-id 5280688).

Even more sinister than his flippant bigotry, Burton appears to favor racial profiling and locking up minorities. Forwarding a Daily Telegraph article in 2007, which alleges that MI5 has been infiltrated by Al Qaeda sympathizers, Burton writes “note Paki cops**” in the subject line, and remarks that it's “time for internment camps.”

Stratfor analyst Kamran Bokhari, himself a Pakistani national who can’t gain entry to the US because of his suspected ties to the ISI, demurely replies, “This thing needs to be handled delicately and you need the right people involved.” (doc-id 1227700)

Before joining Stratfor, Burton enjoyed a long career as a counter-terrorism official with the US Diplomatic Security Service, during which he investigated high-profile cases, such as the Lockerbie bombing (doc-id 376053), the assassination of Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin, and the World Trade Center attack in 1993.

At Stratfor, Burton continues to groom contacts in the private intelligence and security industry that proliferated after 9/11 in Israel and the US (doc-id 1951845), and occasionally returns to work for the US government, including as an advisor on border security issues to Texan governor Rick Perry in 2007. He calls on his friends in the FBI for favors, (doc-id 1633006) but is convinced that “the [Central Intelligence] Agency doesn’t like us” (doc-id 368368).

Burton’s contempt isn’t reserved for Pakistanis and Arabs – he is also suspicious of African Americans (doc-id 1265938), predicting race riots and declaring the country “finished” ahead of the 2008 US presidential election (doc-id 1265938).

A few days after Obama’s electoral victory, he informs other analysts that the Republicans have a “smoking gun” to smear the president for taking donations from unsavory foreign sources, and claims that “black Dems” committed election fraud in Ohio and Pennsylvania (doc-id 339396). It is unclear from the email whether Burton himself was involved in plotting “how and when to ‘out’” the president. In another email thread, Burton attributes the fact that Nigerian oil pipeline bombers reportedly obtained American visas to the president’s race by saying “Obama… it’s a black thing.” (doc-id 5416134)

But Burton’s greatest hostility is undoubtedly reserved for the Chinese. During a company-wide email outage in January 2010, he inquires if it was a “ChiCom attack”– short for Chinese Communist (doc-id 3452549). He generally refers to Chinese as ChiComs, complaining that he “can’t keep these Chinamen staright [sic].” (doc-id 1633006)

Chiming in on a discussion about the March 2008 winter storms, which destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes in the Guangdong province, Burton says, “Who cares if these ChiComs all croak?" (doc-id 1633006) Clearly obsessed with the “ChiCom Menace,” (doc-id 1618981) Burton also predicts that the Chinese are going to eventually “shu[t] us [Stratfor] down one day.” (doc-id 3481100)

We can only speculate which race Burton suspects behind the Stratfor email hack.